5 Advantages of Autonomous Testing

Anushree Chatterjee

Autonomous testing is every tester’s dream. The system takes care of everything, allowing humans to take a breather.

Technologies like AI, NLP, ML, and more take care of various aspects of software testing, such as test case creation, test execution, test maintenance, and test reporting. Sounds too good to be true, right? But it is becoming a tangible dream with each passing day. We may not have the perfect tool that offers complete autonomy, but we do have close seconds that make various aspects of software testing autonomous.

The main reason why the testing community is striving to build autonomous testing systems is due to its advantages.

Advantage #1

Test continuously and frequently: If the system automates test creation, execution, and reporting for you, then it is a no-brainer that the process will be fast compared to a human doing all of it. This means that you need not wait to test the application before certain events like releases or go-lives. Instead, you can make it an ongoing process where testing takes place, like one of those activities that your schedules frequently, and allow it to happen in the background.

Even small changes to the code might have ripple effects on the application. Allegedly, Walmart lost $100M within 10 minutes because of a bug in production. It happens quite rarely, but you don’t want it to happen. Autonomous testing thus acts like insurance.

For example, imagine an e-commerce platform that undergoes frequent updates to introduce new features, improve user experience, and fix bugs. A critical component is the checkout process, which involves multiple steps and interactions.

If testing is performed only at specific intervals, such as before a major release, a critical bug in the checkout process might go unnoticed until the final stages of development. This could result in significant delays, financial losses due to lost sales, and damage to the company’s reputation.

Autonomous testing automates tests that cover various checkout scenarios and runs them with every code change so issues can be identified and addressed promptly. For example, a change in the payment gateway integration might introduce a bug that prevents successful order completion. Continuous testing would quickly flag this issue, allowing developers to fix it before it impacts customers.

You can further integrate with CI/CD pipelines for real-time feedback on code changes.

Advantage #2

Detect defects early: The result of continuous and frequent testing is the ability to detect defects early on in the software testing lifecycle. Let’s say a defect was detected in the development environment; fixing it is going to be easy and painless. Instead, if the same defect went undetected and was found by the customer in production, then you can imagine the efforts that will go into not only fixing this issue but also managing the application version that exists in production and is used by so many.

For example, consider a financial application that calculates interest rates based on various factors. A small change in the formula is introduced. Without early defect detection, this change might go unnoticed until the application is in production. If the error results in incorrect interest rate calculations, it could lead to significant financial losses for the bank and its customers, damage to the bank’s reputation, and regulatory issues. Read: Automated Testing in the Financial Sector: Challenges and Solutions.

Autonomous testing allows early defect detection. It would continuously monitor the codebase and execute relevant test cases. As soon as the change is introduced, the testing system would identify the error in the interest rate calculation. This allows developers to rectify the issue immediately, preventing it from reaching production and causing financial and reputational damage.

Advantage #3

High efficiency and speed: Autonomous testing can execute test cases and analyze results much faster than traditional manual or scripted testing methods. Moreover, since the system takes care of everything, you need not intervene unless necessary, like to check the reports.

For example, consider a large-scale software project with thousands of test cases. Manually executing and analyzing these tests would be extremely time-consuming and prone to human error. A lengthy testing cycle can delay the software release, impacting revenue and market share. Additionally, manual testing is susceptible to human error, leading to missed defects and potential quality issues.

Autonomous testing can execute hundreds or even thousands of test cases simultaneously, providing rapid feedback on code changes. This accelerated testing process allows the team to quickly identify and fix issues, preventing delays and ensuring software quality. Read more about Test Scalability.

Advantage #4

Saves costs: You might not be looking to hire more developers in the near term, but I can bet you that you will at least double your development team size within the next 5-10 years. If you can autoscale regression testing without the need to double your team size, then an autonomous tool will pay for itself with dividends. It will help you scale more easily and save money at the same time.

In addition to this, reducing the need for extensive manual testing and autonomous testing will lower labor costs. Moreover, early detection of defects reduces the cost associated with fixing bugs later in the development cycle.

Imagine a large enterprise software company with a substantial testing team. Manual testing of the complex software requires numerous testers, which translates to significant labor costs. The company faces high overhead expenses for maintaining a large testing team, including salaries, benefits, and infrastructure. Additionally, manual testing is time-consuming, leading to delayed product releases and increased costs.

By implementing autonomous testing, the company can significantly reduce the size of its testing team, focusing human resources on more strategic tasks like test design and analysis. Automated test execution and analysis also accelerate the testing process, reducing time-to-market and associated costs. Furthermore, early defect detection through autonomous testing prevents costly rework and fixes.

Advantage #5

Optimal resource utilization: You’ve employed smart people who already know a lot about your system. You don’t want them to leave because they are forced to do tedious click-throughs instead of interesting, meaningful work. Free your team resources to work on something more meaningful. If your team needs to stop and spend countless hours doing a full regression after every release, then it disrupts the process and slows down development. They could have done better or more testing of branches, PRs, or commits instead.

For example, think of a software development team with a limited number of experienced testers. Manual testing of a complex application is time-consuming and requires significant human effort. The team might struggle to meet testing deadlines, leading to delays in product releases and increased costs. Testers might be overwhelmed with repetitive tasks, preventing them from focusing on critical areas that require human expertise.

Autonomous testing can handle the execution of repetitive test cases, freeing up testers to focus on complex test scenarios, exploratory testing, and test case design. This efficient allocation of resources improves overall test coverage, accelerates the testing process, and enhances the quality of the software product.

Some more advantages

The list continues. Besides the above-mentioned advantages, you can see other benefits like:

• Better adaptability: Autonomous testing systems can quickly adapt to changes in the application under test, such as new features or updates. This keeps the testing relevant and effective even as the application evolves.
• Better accuracy and consistency: Running tests over and over again is easier on a machine. Moreover, you’re going to get consistent results because autonomous testing ensures that the system adapts to code changes. The AI models are trained to determine what is an issue and what isn’t. This will give you dependable results.
• Good test coverage with AI: Autonomous systems are trained to analyze multiple aspects like code, requirements, historical data, and bug reports. They can create and execute a broader range of test cases, including edge cases that might be overlooked by human testers. It is definitely less resource-intensive for the system to do this research and test creation than a human.
• Easy scaling: Autonomous testing systems can easily scale to handle larger and more complex applications. They can manage the increased load without a proportional increase in manual testing efforts.

Issues avoided by opting for autonomous testing

You can dodge many painful bullets by investing in autonomous testing.

• Financial loss: Fixing issues found in higher environments like production will prove costlier than fixing the same issue in a development environment. The loss doesn’t stop there, though. Imagine if a major retailer failed to identify a critical bug in their checkout process until after a major marketing campaign. This will result in lost sales, customer dissatisfaction, and damage to the company’s reputation.
• Reputation damage: A business’s reputation is everything. Imagine if a major outage occurred due to a software error that went undetected in testing. This would result in widespread user frustration and negative publicity for the platform, which could not only lead to financial losses but also drive away customers.
• Delayed time-to-market: In this fast-paced world, timely product launches are everything to keep customers hooked. So, if a major software product is delayed due to the discovery of critical bugs late in the development cycle, it will result in missed market opportunities and increased development costs.
• Increased support costs: A software application with numerous undetected bugs will lead to a surge in customer support inquiries, increasing operational costs.
• Customer dissatisfaction: Working with a glitchy application is a pain. With so many alternatives available in the market today, keeping the loyalty of your users has become increasingly difficult. Thus, fewer defects mean a better user experience, meaning users are using your application.
• Losing valuable resources: Time and effort aren’t the only resources lost. You’ll frustrate and tire your team members, pushing them to consider other alternatives. Testers can focus on higher-value activities.
• Poor job satisfaction: This is one of the downsides of doing repetitive tasks manually. If autonomous testing takes off the load, then testers can focus on challenging and rewarding tasks.

Autonomous testing with testRigor

If you are looking for autonomous testing, testRigor is the closest thing to it. This tool leverages modern technologies like AI, NLP, ML, and more to help you induce autonomy in different processes within software testing, such as test case creation, test execution, test maintenance, and test reporting.

testRigor records test scripts in plain English language, similar to how human testers would write manual test cases. That’s not all. You can make the process autonomous by using the generative AI capabilities of this tool to create tests. Provide a thorough description of the application and watch testRigor create a series of test cases in plain English for you. You can use this as a base, if not the final test cases, and modify these tests manually as required and add more tests to the suite. Besides this, you can manually add tests to the suite or use the record-and-playback feature to do so.

Test runs in this tool are very stable, thanks to AI. testRigor utilizes AI to handle any flakiness that may arise due to unstable environments. Since this tool does not expect testers to mention implementation details of UI elements like XPaths and CSS selectors, any changes in them do not drastically affect the test run. AI ensures that the element is found irrespective. With such stability, test maintenance comes down to a bare minimum. testRigor provides features like self-healing by adapting specification changes that make test execution and maintenance easier.

There’s a lot more you can do with testRigor. Check out the complete list of capabilities and testRigor’s benefits.

“We spent so much time on maintenance when using Selenium, and we spend nearly zero time with maintenance using testRigor.”

Keith Powe VP Of Engineering - IDT